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MUSIC; Bringing Out the Family Ties Of New and Old Music

PIERRE-LAURENT AIMARD, who offers his long-awaited Carnegie Hall debut recital tomorrow evening, is one of those rare pianists who can make us feel that, yes, there are musicians now whose work is as true, as vital, as individual as the performances we can hear on treasured old recordings. We do not have to live in a world of musical ghosts.

Mr. Aimard, 44, a native of Lyon, has been waiting for this moment for a long time. He will take the Carnegie Hall stage as a man with nearly three decades of experience as a concert pianist behind him: he has been playing in public since he won the Messiaen International Competition in Paris at 15. At 19, he was invited by Pierre Boulez to become the resident pianist of the Ensemble Intercontemporain, a position he held for a decade. More recently, he has concentrated on solo work.

Yet in another sense, this recital is an initiation. Not only is it his first in the hall, it also comes at a moment of change. A young pianist, widely appreciated for his liveliness and his thoughtful commitment to new music, is becoming a mature artist, thoroughly embracing old as well as new.

''I tried to create a program specially for this occasion, for my first recital in this celebrated hall,'' he said recently at the kitchen table of the apartment he shares here with his wife -- also a pianist, the Russian-born Irina Kataeva -- and their two children. ''Normally I try to convey something special with each program, in the choice of pieces, of atmospheres. In particular, I try to be a musician by bringing together traditional music and new music.''

On the face of it, Mr. Aimard's Carnegie program is rather conventional, a typical debutant's demonstration of variety in taste and aptitude: Beethoven and Berg in the first half, Debussy, Liszt and Gyorgy Ligeti after intermission. But with Mr. Aimard, nothing ordinary is to be expected. His rationale for his choices proves as cogent and considered as for any of his more flamboyant conjunctions of old and new: of Mr. Ligeti's études with Debussy's, say; or of contrapuntal pieces by Bach and Mr. Boulez; or of Harrison Birtwistle's ''Harrison's Clocks'' with clockwork pieces by other composers; or of 20 wildly different composers from the 20th century (in a Chicago recital this year).

Tomorrow, the cornerstone is Beethoven. ''I wanted to have a key piece of the repertory, the 'Appassionata' Sonata,'' he said. ''I like to play new pieces, but a part of the performer's role is to regenerate interpretation, not to copy what has been done before but to bring new life to important pieces.''

That new life will come, he suggests, not only from studying the score but also from within, from the musical sensibility of the performer. ''If you are trying to educate yourself in particular ways and to experiment in a particular way -- if you have chosen your own culture, so to speak -- then your reaction to a work of art will be something special.''

The other big offering on the program is the six 'Images' of Debussy, which, like the Beethoven, Mr. Aimard calls an important part of his life. ''The Berg sonata complements the Beethoven,'' he said, ''being a piece with a highly unified structure in a certain tradition -- very compact as well -- and also an identity card for me, a piece just on the border between the tradition and new music.''

The juxtaposition of old and new is not only a matter of making musical connections or of presenting contemporary music at the highest level (though this is important to Mr. Aimard, too). It is also a question of fulfilling himself as a performer.

''I have to make a balance, for my own artistic life and for the audience, for the programs,'' he said. ''I want to do new works always within the general frame of trying to be a musician with the piano. That's why for Carnegie Hall I also chose something from the Romantic repertory, Liszt's 'St. François de Paole Marchant sur les Flots,' which contrasts with the 'Images,' and then put three Ligeti études at the end. They have the power of structure of the Viennese composers, together with the great wave of emotion of the Romantic piece and the sense of color and touch in the Debussy.

''So everything comes into focus at the end in a kind of firework. This is what I am trying to do, present different aspects that I bring into a synthesis.''

Mr. Aimard has the full backing of Mr. Ligeti in playing the composer's études, which are ferociously difficult not only technically but also in terms of realizing the poetry and expressive power embroiled in so much teeming complexity. Mr. Ligeti, speaking recently from his Hamburg studio, gave a simple, direct encomium.

''We met after he had already made a recording of my first book of études, and I was impressed by his good technique, the extremely high level of his artistry and the mutual understanding we had,'' Mr. Ligeti said. ''It was honest work. I've also heard him playing Debussy and Bartok: excellent. I decided he was the best pianist for me, and I've heard him giving lectures and courses on my music which prove that he knows it better than I do.''

Indeed, Mr. Ligeti and Mr. Aimard share many musical aims, not least when it comes to bringing together the past and the present. Mr. Aimard said, ''I don't like the kind of musical activity that means having different audiences, different boxes all the time.'' Most particularly, he does not like putting new music into its own box, partitioned from the rest of music and from life.

''This is today's music, and we are living today,'' he said. ''If we want to bring some light from music into our lives and into other people's lives, this should be the first thing. And I feel the need to fight for creators, who are quite isolated in the musical world. Also, having contact with people who create ways of thinking and feeling enlightens the past for us performing musicians, broadens our interpretation.''

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But in his constant pursuit of an ever shifting balance, Mr. Aimard plans also to bring more Bach into his repertory. ''I always had the feeling I would need to be very busy with this composer late in my life, and now is the time to start,'' he said. ''But in order to elaborate an organic and significant Bach interpretation, I still need a very great deal. I need to study much more seriously a lot of pieces, a lot of the cantatas, for instance.''

To approach Bach's keyboard music by way of his cantatas might seem an odd way of going about things, but Mr. Aimard insists that as a pianist, he needs to familiarize himself thoroughly with what a composer has achieved outside the realm of the piano.

''That's maybe the first priority,'' he said, ''because in another context you see what is constant, how a composer will lead an innate and acquired technique through a given situation -- a string quartet or whatever -- but also what is permanent in terms of feeling, organization, etc. That's irreplaceable.

''You need to study everything that creates the context, including the instruments. I don't play early instruments in public, but I do for my pleasure and for my teaching. I'm not dogmatic at all. I don't like the opposite kind of narrow-mindedness, that dismisses any interest in early instruments.''

But early instruments are not there to provide fancy dress. ''What's interesting is not to go back to Beethoven's time but rather to retrieve whatever clues we can from the past, and then to try to make use of them in this world of today, with our environment, our conception of space, our type of culture. Our type of time, too, because that has changed so considerably.''

WHEN asked about the contemporary composers with whom he has particularly fruitful contact, Mr. Aimard mentions two of his own generation: Marco Stroppa and George Benjamin. Both have appeared often in his programs (both were among the Chicago 20 this year), and he is studying a new set of pieces Mr. Benjamin is writing for him.

He encountered Mr. Stroppa and Mr. Benjamin during his time with the Ensemble Intercontemporain. ''It was a dream to work with Boulez, and I wanted to be part of such an ensemble,'' he said. For one thing, it was a great way of learning the modern repertory. But now, he added, ''it's better to focus on composers with whom you have a strong relationship.''

Playing with the Ensemble Intercontemporain also gave him an alternative to the temptations of immediate and short-lived success on the bravura circuit. ''The commercial way is not healthy for a musician's artistic development or human development, so I tried to protect myself at the beginning, to avoid having a career by the age of 20,'' he said. ''Then, in my 30's, I thought it was time to make a lot of experiments, with different repertories, working with singers, different instruments, workshops and so on. After that you know much better what you want to do.''

He also wanted to wait before committing himself to a big-time recording career. ''It happened that feeling ready took rather a long time,'' he recalled wryly. But it also took him a while to find a recording company willing to keep pace with him in his adventurousness. Enter Teldec, which wanted to create a program of recordings that would reflect what he was doing in various fields.

He felt comfortable with the Teldec people. They were talking the same language, and it was the language of music. ''It is extremely important that the artistic people keep control,'' he said. ''And I'm not just talking about performers here, because very often people with musical responsibilities in administration have a much bigger artistic dimension than many performers.''

So far, his Teldec releases have included a staggering account of Messiaen's ''Vingt Regards sur l'Enfant-Jésus,'' and a recording of the Debussy études, just out. Off in the future is a set of the Beethoven piano concertos conducted by Nikolaus Harnoncourt, with whom he rapidly formed a rapport.

''I was not astonished at all that somebody with a powerful musical sense, even coming from a different tradition, would not be hard to meet. You learn so much from him, and'' -- here he echoed what he had said about his chosen composers -- ''I think it's much better to concentrate on strong relationships like that.''

Alas, just as Mr. Aimard's Teldec career was getting off the ground, the company lost its independent existence, and he lost his sympathetic colleagues within it.

''But I have not lost my conviction,'' he said. ''I've been trying for a long time to prepare what I thought would be interesting to some people, something that had a certain validity and originality. I'm not going to throw that away.''

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A version of this article appears in print on December 2, 2001, on Page 2002023 of the National edition with the headline: MUSIC; Bringing Out the Family Ties Of New and Old Music. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe